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Soviet campaign of persecution against Indigenous medicine people / shamans in North Asia


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Soviet campaign of persecution against Indigenous medicine people / shamans in North Asia (Nentsy people is my guess from what they show here). Text at right reads, "Don't allow shamans and kulaks." (The latter a term for well-off peasants that Stalin weaponized in the 30s, in genocidal campaigns against "the kulaks" and enforcing collectivization that sucked all the grain out of Ukraine, resulting in the Holodomor, "Great Hunger").

I can't exactly make out the rest of the text but it appears to say "Choose the worker's [party] in Tuzemen Soviet." [Edit: Tuzemen means "Native," so basicly this means "Native Council," within context of Bolhevik Soviets.] Many thanks to Policarpo Corvalán Aravena for this, and for the pdf I'll quote from in Comments: Bulgakova, T., Sundström, O. (2017)
"Repression of shamans and shamanism in Khabarovsk Krai: 1920s to the early 1950s." It begins with this 1931 quote from Innokentii M. Suslov: "Shamanism is and will be an obstacle to socialist construction. The struggle against shamanism cannot and must not be conducted in isolation from the general construction. The struggle against shamanism is a part of the socialist construction itself."

"In the 10th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1921, it was decided that the indigenous peoples of the North should be assisted, by the Party, to take the leap from a “primitive,” “pre-class” society to a socialist one. The economic, political, and cultural level of the indigenous societies was to be raised through the implementation of Soviet administration, law, and economics as well as through the development of schools, newspapers, and other cultural institutions. 
...
"legal restrictions with the aim of marginalising the influence of purported shamans and some of their activities were established in the 1920s. There are, however, also examples of, and above all many narratives about, arrests and even executions of shamans in the 1930s. 

"Nanai shamans, like other shamans of the indigenous peoples of the Lower Amur, were called the enemies of the people, and many of them were executed during the repressions in the 1930s. An entire era of Nanai spiritual life and Nanai world-view was liquidated together with them. (Bereznitskiy 2003: 215, our translation)

"The Sakha scholar P. N. Il’yakhov-Khamsa (1995: 22) also contends that “mass arrests” of shamans took place and that Evenk shamans were arrested and shot without inquiry or trial, accused of being “deceivers of the people.” He exemplifies the purge of shamans with Konstantin I. Chirkov, who was disfranchised (Ru. lishenets) and arrested in February 1932, charged with being a kulak." [Here we see the overlap of the "kulak" persecution with the suppression of Native culture. The state confiscated this man's herds and hunting rifle too.]

"There are several examples of so-called shamans who in the 1920s both assisted the Red Army during the Civil War and who took leading positions in the new Soviet local administration. The Soviet North was vast, and conditions most likely varied between the different parts of the area. There is, for instance, evidence that the persecution of shamans was quite severe in Yakutia already during the Civil War. N. D. Vasil’eva (2000: 27–28) concludes that in the first years of the 1920s shamanic ritual objects were forcefully confiscated and destroyed, and shamans were “subjected to political discrimination and morally discredited.” Some shamans were also brought to public court trials. But there is no evidence of such severe punishments, such as executions, that Orthodox priests were subjected to at the time (see Pospielovsky 1988: 1–18; Corley [ed.] 1996: 14)."

See comments for more, in which they explain that some Indigenous groups, including the shamans [saman, actually, in Nentsy] cooperated with the Soviets, hoping for a change in the colonial relations with Russia. 

Bulgakova, T., Sundström, O. (2017) "Repression of shamans and shamanism in Khabarovsk Krai: 1920s to the early 1950s." In: Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström (ed.), Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research (pp. 225-262). Huddinge: Södertörns högskola. Södertörn Academic Studies
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-143114

 

 

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